Guitar hero Slash is back home in the Midlands, and this time the crowd is more than 100,000-strong.

“Yes, I really was that little drummer boy,” he says. “When I was at school in Stoke I was in a lot of plays. I remember being in The Twelve Days Of Christmas, too. I was the apple of my grandparents’ eye.”

Note there’s no mention there of mum or dad. His African-American mother Ola, a renowned costume designer for the likes of David Bowie, John Lennon and others, had returned to Los Angeles to set up in business.

His English father Anthony was an artist and spent a lot of time on the road, leaving Saul to be raised much of the time by grandparents Charles and Sybil Hudson at their home in Stoke.

“I still have vivid memories of life in the Potteries,” says Slash now. “It was a community that had somehow skated through history unchanged. Most people there never left the place.

“My grandparents had never ventured the hundred miles or so south to London, and when my dad took me there on the train, it seemed a lifetime away from Stoke’s unending brown brick houses.

“In the evenings I’d entertain myself by watching Thunderbirds and The Avengers (not the Marvel Comics series but a surreal show starring bowler-hatted Steed and leather-clad Emma Peel).

“There were only three television channels back then, and most of the time they just showed news. It’s no wonder that I grew up wanting a bit of escapism. I found that in my parents’ record collection.

“They had everything from Beethoven to Led Zeppelin and I continued to find undiscovered gems among those LPs well into my teens, by which time I was living with them out in LA.”

The rest, of course, is rock and roll history. Slash became a household name with Guns N’ Roses, twice almost killing himself in the process on a diet of drugs, drink and groupies. At one point he was given six days to live.

That he’s still alive is a miracle (and partly due to the device he has inserted to kick-start his heart should it stop beating). That he looks healthy, fit and hopeful is all the more remarkable.

I meet Slash just after he has accepted Classic Rock magazine’s prestigious Album of the Year award. It’s for the solo set he released earlier this year, and which features guest appearances by many of the artists he most admires.

The song they recorded together, Beautiful Dangerous, is being released as a single in the New Year – and Slash says it’s not as unlikely as it might appear to the uninitiated.

“To many people, Fergie wasn’t an obvious choice for me to work with,” he says. “But, you see, I just knew she had a dynamite rock and roll voice. I’d heard her doing a rock medley at a Black Eyed Peas gig, and she was belting out the lyrics.

“I thought: Hell, yeah! After that I did a bunch of gigs with Black Eyed Peas. They were including Sweet Child O’ Mine in the set, and you should have heard her sing that. I think she’s the best woman rock and roll singer I’ve heard in the last 20 years.

“So when I came up with a song that required a woman’s touch, it was natural I should call.

“We’re going to work together again. There was another song we cut during the sessions for the album, and she liked it so much that she plans to use it on a solo album of her own. It’s going to be a real rock and roll album, and I’ll be delighted to play on it.”

There’ll also be another solo album, with Alter Bridge frontman Myles Kennedy handling all the vocals, and a summer UK tour which will sadly not include a return to Donington Park.

“I’d love to play Donington again but we have a tour in August with the solo band and I think Download comes a little too early.

“I’ve played there four times with four different bands [Guns N’ Roses, Slash’s Snakepit, Velvet Revolver and Slash] and it really is the best gig of them all.

“That festival is really important to me. In fact, UK gigs in general are important. The British fans are the ones you really need to win over, and they’ve been supportive ever since the early days.”

It was at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington in 1988 that two fans were trampled to death close to the front of the stage as Guns N’ Roses played what was at that stage their biggest gig.

“The audience was crazy, just this sea of surging people,” he says. “Axl stopped the show a couple of times and pleaded with the fans to take two steps back. We thought it was sorted, but it wasn’t.

“We had no idea that anyone was actually hurt, let alone killed. After we’d done the gig, and we were celebrating in a nearby pub, our manager came in and told us the news. It was horrible.

“What had been cause for celebration had become a tragedy.”

Talk inevitably turns to the growing gossip about a Guns N’ Roses reunion. Bassist Duff McKagan, who appears with Slash in supergroup Velvet Revolver, jammed with Axl Rose’s version of Guns in London this month.